The MAPL Test

NOTE: During the production of this episode, over 120 Canadian musicians were mentioned in conversation with guests and sources—way too many to fit into an episode. As a way to shine a spotlight on the vast landscape of Canadian music, we have put together a playlist of these musicians for listeners. Listen on Spotify or on Amazon Music.

Canada is a country with about 41 million people — that’s only a little bit bigger than the population of California. But the country punches well above its weight in terms of very famous musicians. Some are instantly recognizable: everybody knows Drake and Justin Bieber are from Canada. Dig in a little further, though, and Canadian musicians span across genres and decades. Today, Canada has one of the biggest music industries in the world, thanks in no small part to a government-regulated cultural policy called CanCon.

The policy was created in the early 1960s. Back then, there was essentially no modern music industry in Canada; unlike the U.S. or the U.K., there were very few local recording studios to produce Canadian music, or local record labels interested in distributing Canadian music.

Canadian musicians who wanted to find success had two options. The first, was hiding their nationality and pretending to be British—which a lot of bands did—and the second was moving away from Canada entirely, to a country with a more established music industry. Aside from a few outliers, Canadian musicians couldn’t get big in Canada in this cultural environment.

This changed after a surge in national pride during Canada’s centennial in 1967. Thanks to a year of wildly successful celebrations to mark the country’s 100th anniversary, there was a movement to nurture Canadian culture, and support artists with new policies. In 1970, a new cultural regulator known then as the Canadian Radio and Television Commission, or CRTC, proposed a mandate that would require domestic radio stations to play a minimum 30% of Canadian-made music during the week. A year later, the mandate became law. These regulations became known as Canadian Content laws, and the content became known as CanCon.

The first decade of CanCon laws did not prove to be fruitful for Canada’s music industry. Radio programmers saw Canadian-made music as sub-par, and did their best to play CanCon songs during times when listeners weren’t tuning in. But with the instant demand for CanCon brought on by the mandate, Canadian recording studios started to pop up, along with Canadian music producers, and record labels focused on distributing Canadian music. By the 1980s, Canadian musicians were able to sustain a career domestically. Corey Hart was a one-hit wonder in most countries, but in Canada he was a machine, making chart-toppers until 1998. The Tragically Hip became a kind of hometown hero for the entire country: a broadcast of their final concert was watched by 12 million Canadians, roughly a third of the population.

Canada’s music industry really took off with the Canadian alt-rock boom. By the 1990s, music radio programmers had embraced CanCon, and records from smaller Canadian acts saw regular play during prime-time listening hours. As the country started to gain recognition for being a steady stream of good music, international music labels sent scouts to smaller Canadian cities, looking for the next hit musical act. Halifax alt-rock band Sloan had only played a dozen performances and released one demo tape by the time the American label Geffen had offered them a record deal.

(Sloan’s The Good In Everyone, funded in part by the MuchFACT program)

By the mid-1990s, Canada had the sixth-largest music market in the world, beating out countries with much larger populations like Italy, Mexico, and Brazil. The Philippines introduced its own radio quota in 1987. France mandated French-language content in 1996. Today, every continent except Antarctica has at least one country running some version of the same experiment.

Although Canada’s radio mandates were successful in propping up the country’s national music industry in the 20th century, there are questions about the validity of the system in the modern age. Around 2005, Canada experienced a huge boom in its indie music scene, but most Canadian indie bands saw little radio play, and instead found success thanks to music blogs and placement in commercials, among other ways of going viral.

Another critique of CanCon laws is that the beneficiaries of the mandate tend to be white musicians. CanCon mandates do not dictate what genres or groups should get radio airplay, and studies show that songs by non-white musicians are played on the radio at a far lower rate in comparison. One such artist is Jeremy Dutcher, an award-winning Wolastoqiyik singer-songwriter based in Montreal. Dutcher is world-renowned for his compositions of traditional Indigenous songs accompanied by contemporary instruments, but his music—and the music of other Indigenous musicians in Canada—are rarely played on the radio.

(Jeremy Dutcher’s Mehcinut, funded in part by the Music Video Production Project)

With the rise in popularity of music streaming, CanCon mandates have further become obsolete. While CanCon laws ensure terrestrial radio stations play a certain amount of CanCon music weekly, Spotify and other streaming platforms use an on-demand model for listening, and users are ultimately in control of the music they listen to.

But while radio mandates are becoming less important, the Canadian government continues to support musicians in other ways. Since the inception of Canadian Content laws, the country’s music industry has been buoyed by a robust funding framework established in part by the federal government. Today, arts foundations at all levels of government provide direct financial support to musicians to help with recording, touring, and more. Rapper Rollie Pemberton, who performs under the name Cadence Weapon, credits the support he received from government arts funding with helping his career. “Whenever I tour in the States and I talk to people, they’re like, they give you money to make music? Literally, they help you? Why??” says Pemberton. “People can’t believe it.”

(Cadence Weapon’s Fall 2012 Couture)

In an industrial sense, Canadian Content laws were a huge success. These regulations aided in building an entire industry from-scratch, and helping Canadian music reach a global audience. But the terrestrial radio-focused CanCon rules aren’t terribly future-proof, and a main part of the support system may been lost in the era of streaming. But Canadian music will still exist, with or without the CanCon system to spotlight it, because great art always finds a way.